Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic DVD LS855 - DVD player - portable - display: 8.5"

We bought the DVD-LS855 this week for a road trip for our 2 1/2 year old boy. We unpacked it, attached the battery, dropped in the DVD, and he was hooked. He wanted to watch all DVDs on it (even inside the house) because it was perfect for his size. I was easily able to attach the car / headrest holder, although it took a little work to get it snug.

The video quality isn't going to set any records, but it does the job. Our 2 year doesn't care.

There are two headphone jacks, but I wouldn't want to try and share it between two kids sitting on opposite sides of the car. It'd be fine for a hotel room though.

The manual has a chart that shows battery life. If you want the longest battery life, you have to have brightness at minimum and use headphones. If you have the brightness cranked up, don't expect more than 2 hours. The good news is that the battery is detachable, so you can buy a spare battery and/or buy an extended life battery.

Pros:
Good size for a car trip.
Includes a carry bag that holds everything, including DVDs to watch.
Included car holder is greatly preferable to the bag stands. It sits at the right position to be seen in the car seat.
Plays movies in DivX format.
When you turn the player on, it resumes playing from where it stopped.
The kid loves it :-)

Cons:
Video quality
Play and stop buttons are along the top front edge of the unit. If you try and pick it up anywhere along the front, you'll almost certainly hit the wrong button.

In summary, if you want high quality video on a larger screen, use your $1,000 laptop computer. If you want a convenient player for your kids for car trips, this is perfect.

I read many reviews about portable DVD and DivX players. I wanted to DivX player as a DVD holds about 2 hours of movie where as a DVD-R media holds about 6-7 hours of DivX/AVI movie file which is good for a long trip w/o switching the DVDs in the middle and etc. This certainly plays DivX/AVI files very well.

I was bit worried about the volume as I read a lot of complains about sound being not lound enough on other products. This I don't see how a volume could be a problem. It gets very very lound at the highest volume (w/o the headphone) and I can't imagine a volume could be a problem unless the file itself was recorded at a very low volume.

I ordered a separate case that I can use to attach between the headrests, but I shouldn't have. The bag that comes with this is made so that I can easily make it sit between the front seats with a bit of creativity.

Image quality is good compare to TV screen, but probably excellent comparing to other portable DVD players. I am happy with what I see from it.

The control buttons at the front does bother a bit, but once you have it set and start playing, you don't really need to touch those buttons, so not a big problem.

One thing.. this doesn't come with A/V cord as listed by Amazon. Only DVD-LS865 model comes with A/V cord.

Headrest bracket is included and I haven't used it yet, but it looks to be good, stable, and easy to install. And easy to attach and detach the DVD player unit.

I can't wait to take a road trip with our two little kids (3 and half, and almost 2 years old) and this unit playing the movies... hopefully they will sit through and behave. :)

As a mother, I found this to be a great product. It met all of our needs, which was a DVD player for the car for our 2 year old's DVD (cartoons).

We looked at a lot of other models and this one was well worth the money. Excellent quality for what we needed.

The headrest attachment is easy to install.

We recommend it!

In general, I like the unit. Sound is fine w/ good noise cancelling headsets. Used on plane and train. BUT.. so far, on a full new re-charge, I've barely gotten thru a 2 hr movie. Advertised as having "Up to 6 hrs viewing".. Hardly... (Maybe I just got a bad battery??)

In 2008, we bought a LS855 for our special needs grandson to use on long auto trips. I worked fine for at least the initial trip but when we tried to use it later in the year (just post warranty expiration) it took a veery long time to read any disc we tried and ended up giving us a message of "This type of disc cannot be played. Please insert a different disc" despite the fact that we were inserting discs already played. A local repair shop, recommended by the Panasonic web stie, indicate that the repair would cost around $200 - more than the unit costs new. So much for the vaunted Panasonic durability